Fringe Review: ‘The Face Zone,’ Martin Graff, Capital Fringe

Martin Graff is an illustrator, author and composer who has created this heartfelt work based on his travels and life and musings about how humans connect with one another. He uses his own life to riff on how we interact with the world and how our perceptions change.

‘The Face Zone’ is an earnest, humorous look at one man’s travels to a wider world.

Using a keyboard, simple, barely-delineated sketches and a soothing voice to tantalize the audience with faces and pictures representing his different thoughts, he guides the audience through a series of vignettes ranging from an idyllic hour spent on a deserted beach in Hawaii to how his beard helped him connect with school children he was teaching to working in an office in Asia and how food choices can be a minefield of preconceived ideas about society.

Through his musings, he comes to the realization that so much of our personal values and beliefs are a product of the larger society—an idea that has been explored before—but in his hands, he underscores the importance of looking within to find out why we react as we do in different settings, and then urges the audience to make the jump to giving that grace to all we meet.

In this deeply personal study of his on-going journey, Graff offers a path to recognizing how our internal monologues affect our perceptions, and how to step back and ask, why? Is it valid? Is it relevant? Is it keeping us from fully experiencing our lives?

His compositions are soothing and serve as a means to give the audience a chance to reflect on his vignettes. The illustrations are cunningly child-like, meant to serve as a stepping-off point to go deeper without using color and line and scale as an unconscious means to set limits on how far one is willing to explore.

“The Face Zone” is an earnest, humorous look at one man’s travels to a wider world. He strives to treat all he meets gently and to be forgiving of each other as we strive to make connections and move liquidly through the greater world.

Advisory: Language.

Running Time: 45 minutes with no intermission.

“The Face Zone” is at Crocodile, Saint Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Washington, DC and shows are July 7, July 26 and July 27. For more information, please click here.

About the author

Ms. Johnson has worked in theatre for 10 years as a house manager; and has also volunteered as an usher at numerous theatres in the Washington metropolitan region. She has a long-standing affinity for theatre, going back to seeing the original Man of La Mancha as a child.